A conjecture of Beauville and Catanese revisited

Abstract.: A theorem of Green, Lazarsfeld and Simpson (formerly a conjecture of Beauville and Catanese) states that certain naturally defined subvarieties of the Picard variety of a smooth projective complex variety are unions of translates of abelian subvarieties by torsion points. Their proof uses analytic methods. We refine and give a completely new proof of their result. Our proof combines galois-theoretic methods and algebraic geometry in positive characteristic. When the variety has a model over a function field and its Picard variety has no isotrivial factors, we show how to replace the galois-theoretic results we need by results from model theory (mathematical logic). Furthermore, we prove partial analogs of the conjecture of Beauville and Catanese in positive characteristi